The entertainment industry is producing an ever-increasing number of video and/or audio products for private and public use. Today, a consumer may rent or purchase a movie in a videocassette format, a laser disk format, a DVD format, etc. In addition, the user may view a movie via a television broadcast, cable broadcast, and/or satellite broadcast. Similarly, for audio products, a consumer may purchase audiocassettes. CDs, or sound tracks or listen to radio and/or satellite audio broadcasts. In addition to the numerous sources of audio and/or video materials, the content of such merchandise is more explicit than in the past. As such, the debate over how, and who, should censor such material is increasing.
The U.S. movie industry has addressed the censorship issue by providing ratings to the movies it produces based on the audio and/or video content. Such ratings include: G indicating that the content is acceptable for general audiences, PG indicating that parental guidance is suggested because some of the content may be too mature for all persons; PG-13 indicating that the movie may be inappropriate for children under 13; R indicating that the movie is restricted such that no one under the age of 17 may view the movie in a theater without his or her parents; R-17 indicating the no one under the age of 17 is allowed to view the movie in a theater, and X indicating the content is explicitly for adults. Based on these ratings, parents and/or guardians may monitor the movies in which they allow their children to view at a movie theater. While the rating system works fairly well to restrict younger viewers from viewing inappropriate movies at public theaters, it only provides guidance to parents and/or guardians for publicly displayed movies.
With the increased number of sources for providing audio and/or video content into the home, such as cable, satellite, VCR tapes, laser disks, DVD disks, etc., the challenge to monitor a child's viewing choices is becoming an increasingly difficult task. To address this issue, the United States has undertaken a quest to establish a standard that would enable a parent to automatically restrict their children's viewing. Such a standard revolves around parental control technology. In essence, parental control technology allows a parent to enable a video and/or audio source receiver (e.g., a video cassette player, television, cable box, satellite receiver, etc.) to restrict the showing of movies that the parent has deemed inappropriate. As such, the parent can set a parental control device to any desired level of censoring.
The parental control regulation, as issued by the United States, has established that at least a portion of manufactured video and/or audio source receivers shall be equipped with the parental control technology, ramping up to full compliance over the next few years. Thus, any manufacturer that produces a video and/or audio source receiver, which includes computers equipped with a video tuner and/or encoder, must be compliant with this standard.
Therefore, a need exists for a method and apparatus that enables a computer that is capable of presenting video, audio and/or text information to be compliant with the parental control standard.